You can enter your school between January 1 and March 31st! Why Green Schools? Pureology says:

When a school goes green, children benefit—as well as the environment! Green schools lead to:

Improved student performance. When children learn in classrooms with natural daylight, improved sound quality and non-toxic building materials such as non-VOC carpets and paints, test scores can improve as much as 20%. Attendance also improves!

More funds for student resources. When green upgrades are made to a school, water and energy costs can be reduced by as much as 40%. These savings can be channeled back into resources that directly benefit students, such as textbooks, computers and other essentials.

Every child deserves a learning environment that’s safe, comfortable and free of harmful toxins. Unfortunately, many schools across the country lack the funds to carry out much-needed repairs and renovations—subjecting children to outdated facilities with improper ventilation, poor lighting and inefficient energy usage. Global Green USA is working to address this situation and ensure that every child has the opportunity to learn in a healthy, green school.

You can help by nominating a school in your area for a Green School Makeover—read on to learn more, and find out how you can green your school!

My main idea for the entry was to introduce school-owned, student-issued laptops or netbooks for students to use to complete in school and homework assignments, read eTexbooks on and also to pre-order their lunch menus eliminating the large problem of wasted foods in schools across the country. I don’t mean for them to have a restaurant type menu, but, they could offer an entree or replacement choice of sandwich, a vegetable choice and a fruit choice. The students could place their orders at the end of one month for the next. Or even weekly. Just simple check boxes. They already use electronic lunch cards, they could then be tied to their choices through the cards or at the very least, the cooks can plan 150 main entrees and 50 sandwich alternatives rather than have 50 hungry kids and 50 entrees in the trash. These ideas result in cost savings ultimately (think about how quickly technology changes and how costly it is to replace every text book to stay updated with whats relevant, not to mention the bookcovers and back breaking weight of those textbooks!!) as well as making the school a little more Green!